familypediawikiaorg-20200214-history
Familypedia talk:Collaboration of the month
(2006 discussion copied from Watercooler.) Time for enticing some experts in from Central Wikia? With our recent activity, which has shown some of you how ignorant I am about some technical matters such as footnotes and text boxes, I propose that we add ourselves to the list of potential candidates for "Collaboration of the month" on Central Wikia so as to get a bit of a look from keen Wikians who may happen to know how to do some of the things Bill and I want done (and maybe some of what Tasc wants, although he discovers most things soon after asking!!!). It will need a bit of a promotional paragraph, which I may start if I have time. Then it will need votes; four might be enough, but more would help, preferably before 1 December. Robin Patterson 06:25, 23 November 2006 (UTC) :I'll be happy to help with that, when I return this weekend. Bill 10:34, 23 November 2006 (UTC) :I'll be happy to collaborate too, if I can be of any help.--Tasc 16:55, 23 November 2006 (UTC) Right-oh, folks, voting at http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Collaboration_of_the_month/vote#Genealogy and see if you can improve the pulling-power of my advertisement on http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Collaboration_of_the_month Robin Patterson 19:29, 23 November 2006 (UTC) :I looked at the Collab page, and a note at the top says that all of the current proposals are deficient in not describing specific tasks that need done. We should try to rectify that for ours. What specifically do we want the larger Wikia community to do? Merely to come here and add more ancestor pages? Or are there specific tasks that we need some wiki expertise for? I think that there are. I like the direction Bill is going in, and I'd love to see some more structured input along the lines of Rodovid or WeRelate. I like the flexibility here, but the major deficiency I see is the need to duplicate information on multiple pages. If we could have structured data about family relationships that could be incorporated in a flexible way, that would be ideal. If this wikia decides it wants to go in that direction, that's certainly an area where we could use some wiki-expertise consulting. What do others think? TomChatt 22:07, 24 November 2006 (UTC) :I'd like to carry on this discussion in a slightly different setting66.32.17.82 02:00, 25 November 2006 (UTC)further explanation to follow in a different format. 66.32.17.82 02:00, 25 November 2006 (UTC). Bill has added some really good detail to the statement of what sort of collaboration we would like. Convinced me!! Robin Patterson 19:36, 29 November 2006 (UTC) We seem to have succeeded. Five and a half votes, with the nearest contender just three votes. I've noted accordingly on the Vote/Talk page. So Bill and others can sharpen up the questions and prepare for a visit from a couple of "experts". (OK, a dozen experts might be better, but the Collaboration doesn't always bring floods of visitors!) Robin Patterson 00:11, 1 December 2006 (UTC) :I'd be happy with one who came armed with a working knowledge of PHP and developing extensions. Bill 00:30, 3 December 2006 (UTC) (Bill's thoughts inspired by discussion of logos) ...Right now I'm filling in blanks, and adjusting things to make them work better, but the real need is improvement in basic functionality of this wiki. In most wikia sites links between articles are commonplace; that's helpful, but not particularly fundamental to the function of the site---articles can be linked or not linked. If they are, there's some added utility as people can easily pursue other facets touched on by the article. But linking the articles is not a fundamental requirement. Here, linkage of articles is a fundamental requirement--parent pages are linked to child pages, and child pages to grandchild pages, and so on down through the generations. In addition, because you have links to spousal families at each generation, you end up with a very complex set of interlinked articles---very web like. That creates certain problems for this wiki. In particular, information from one article is going to appear on a good many other articles. For example, a father's page would include a child list---that child list will probably have the Dates of Birth, Death, Spouses, and perhaps other information. That same information has to be entered onto the child's own page, and it needs to be the same data in both places. And when the data changes (yes, it does change) it has to be changed everywhere a particular datum appears.---which, depending on the family, and the datum involved, might be on a dozen or more different pages. Currently, that has to be accomplished manually...which means sometimes it gets done, and sometimes it doesn't. There are ways around this problem. Theoretically, we know how information like that can be shared between pages. In practice, the programming underlying the wiki does not currently permit this. What we need to do is develop appropriate extensions to handle this kind of chore automatically. My understanding is that this can be done through extensions. Writing extension for the wiki requires PHP programming experience. That is not exactly a slight task, but that's the one we most need to have accomplished on this site. Any thoughts? Bill 20:40, 14 December 2006 (UTC)